The idea of taking an address book application and turning it into a social network isn’t new - Plaxo just did it two weeks ago.
Now ZYB, a Danish startup, is using the mobile phone contact list as the center of the network, and the company doesn’t have the emotional baggage that still lingers with Plaxo and makes many users hesitant to trust them (I, for one, forgave them long ago).
Zyb first launched in mid 2006 as a service to back up your mobile phone. Through a relatively painless process, users can auto-sync their contacts and calendar to ZYB’s servers. It’s useful in the event of a lost phone, but the web interface is actually much easier to use to enter new contact and calendar information, too. The service, which is free, has about 200,000 active users (mostly in Europe).
ZYB, realizing that people add most or all of their close friends, co-workers and family as mobile phone contacts, has now built a social network to leverage those connections. You can add anyone on your contact list as a friend, which sends a request to them to add you as well. Users have standard profile pages to add photos, comments, etc. And they can also text/sms in status updates which appear on their profile, and friends can choose to subscribe to those status updates via text as well (very Twitter-like).
ZYB is free to users, although the company says they will eventually add premium services like Outlook-sync for an additional fee.
The basic ZYB service is difficult to use on U.S. mobile phones, although the setup takes only a minute on European phones. U.S. residents can still sign up and use the service, though (as I have done) and simply add contacts manually.
The company is headquartered in Copenhagen, and has a development office with most of its 20 employees in Cambridge. They raised €3 million in funding from Nordic Venture Partners in late 2006.
I saw a Showcase of Zyb on The Next Web conference. I think they have an edge here (in Europe) and it makes a lot of sense to use the address book as the center and starting point of a social network (just like plaxo).
I like this idea. Let see a U.S. version!
Zyb also has some rockstar help over at hello group/web/brand
Zyb definitely goes on my ‘i wish i thought of that’ list of hot businesses.
Hi Michael,
Today in my post I wrote about the possibility to convert your list into a Facebook profile. Here you talk about something toward this direction. Very interesting.
Mario Ruiz
@ http://www.oursheet.com
Is it me or does mobile suck?
I am flippin’ tired of hearing about mobile. Mobile, mobile, mobile. AAAHHHH!
I’m sorry if this is a dumb question, but how do you get the contacts from the phone to this service? It seems most US phones aren’t too user friendly in that regard. I know the PDAs, iphones, etc can probably do it…but what about the average cell?
Rather unfortunate for them that Zyb means penis in Arabic
readr.com does something similar to plaxo pulse (and zyb, minus the mobile). worth checking out.
Interestingly, Zyb can actually be considered a curse word in Hebrew.
I wrote about this here:
http://communityhacker.com/zyb.....in-hebrew/
Roy.
I’m not sure why people believe mobile social networking is the next way to go, I’ve seen very little to no usage in this area.
Consider first: Population size > % of Pop. that has mobile phone > % of mobile phones that are technically capable of internet surfing (being the phone or the provider) > the % of users that use their phones for surfing > the % of users who are in your target market
As you can see, it narrows out the field to a very niche service.
Zyb has a great idea…very cool! With the many millions of people walking around with a highly capable phone, this makes perfect sense. The computer power sitting in people’s pockets, purses or backpacks has been growing phenomenally in the last 5 years - there’s no better way to establish and grow a social networking community than the through the mobile phone.
We know SMS is the current social networking app of choice and taking that medium to the next level by leveraging the full capability (and already existing address books) of the phone is a no brainer in my view.
Kudos to Zyb!
Ian
Actually it works through SyncML so it works on phones with that wich is quite a lot.
Actually ZYB has most (80%+) employees located in Copenhagen not in Cambridge as stated in article. I worked on the new version of the site. Hope you like it.
I agree, it makes sense to use the mobile phone as the center of a social network. Congratulations to Tommy Ahlers.